Louise Gluck is familiar to readers of contemporary American poetry. As early as her debut appearance in Paul Carroll's Young American Poets (1968), her work intimated a poet of consequence. There was something about the obvious technical facility and self-lacerating tone that was immediately engaging, not to say arresting. Her first book, Firstborn (Middlesex: Anvil Press, 1969), initially published in the United States by the New American Library in 1968, substantiated that impression. In a review of the book, Robert Hass wrote that the poems were "hard, artful, and full of pain," characteristics of the poetic episteme in which they were written.

True to its "confessional" sources, the poetry of Firstborn is, as Hass hints, formally strict, musically dense, and thematically elliptical, even obscure. But two poems, "The Egg" and "The Wound," set forth Gluck's obsessive subject, abortion, and form a kind of thematic matrix for the book as a whole, focusing its somewhat blurred emphases. And those emphases, the recurring themes of emptiness, sterility and death, are powerfully reinforced by their juxtaposition with the plenitude, fertility, and vitality of the natural world or, one might say, the natural fertility of the physical world. Hence, in the presence of nature ("Ripe things sway in the light,]Parts of plants, leaf/Fragments"), not the "gored roasts" or "plot/Of embryos," abortion seems unnatural, contra natura. Furthermore, what the poems insist in their oblique way is that one can never be done with something like abortion. What is seemingly dead, past, returns--as Freud knew--to haunt the present and future, obsessively alive. Such, at least, is the poetic premise of Firstborn.

It is a commonplace that every poet has his or her subject and, as readers, we grant them this. Yet in an art that has been dominated by male obsessions (what Foucault calls the discourse of power), Gluck's subject is an uncommonly female one, even as the style and models of Firstborn are not. Herein lies the contradictory nature and ambiguous achievement of the book. This is not to say that Gluck polemicizes her subject as, I think, Adrienne Rich has in recent books. Although "The Egg" and "The Wound" are not wholly successful artistically speaking because of the unresolved disjunction between verse and voice, they are still too rich and complex for the reductionism of 'right-to-life" or "radical feminist" slogans. Gluck is not intent to teach, but to present. And what is presented--sometimes coolly, sometimes fiercely, always forcefully--is not easily dismissed. Which is simply to say that Gluck is not a proselytizer but a poet, and an accomplished one at that.

Gluck has, as they say, learned her craft. In fact, much of the abiding interest of Firstborn resides in the tension between her subject and her means, her particular voice and the vigorous pull of tradition. One can detect the influence of Berryman and Sexton, though her primary models are Lowell and Plath: specifically, the Lowell of Life Studies (1959) and For the Union Dead (1964) and the Plath of The Colossus (1960) and Ariel (1961). For instance, the beginning of "The Lady in the Shingle," with its querulous tone and mixed diction, slant-rhymes and involuted syntax, sounds remarkably like Lowell's "Water," the first poem of For the Union Dead:

   Cloistered as the snail and conch
   In Edgartown where the Atlantic
   Rises to deposit junk
   On plush, extensive sand and the pedantic

   Meet for tea, amid brouhaha
   I have managed this peripheral still,
   Wading just steps below
   The piles of overkill:

   Jellyfish. But I have seen
   The slick return of one that oozed back
   On a breaker. Marketable sheen.
   The stuffed hotel ... (FB, 25)

On the other hand, Plath's influence, unlike Lowell's, is less explicit. Outside of tone and some imagery (e.g., the ubiquitous skulls and bald babies), it is most obvious in Gluck's recourse throughout the book to epizeuxis, a favorite, almost signature device of Plath's. …